The digital world is evolving these days continuously. The process of website development is in the same category. To increase audience engagement and keep content attractive, you must stay on top of your digital game and cover the recent digital trends. Otherwise, it won’t be long before your website is at risk of becoming stale or irrelevant. With a quality website builder like Strikingly, you can change your website anytime you want.
There is nothing better than having a website builder that promotes your brand effectively. However, promoting your brand isn’t just about building a website and leaving it there. You must work consistently on essential factors, such as search engine optimization (SEO), website performance, and updating your website. There are numerous decisions that you have to make before making changes to your website.
Website updates are performed for several reasons. It could just be a quick check to ensure the website is functioning properly. Or you want to make drastic changes, such as changing the primary keywords that your website targets. The point is, your website needs to be updated regularly to make sure the contents are updated.
Reasons to Update Your Website
1) More Website Traffic
If you keep your website content up to date, you will build trust between yourself and your customers. Customers will start to rely on your site for important information regardless of your market.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
When you update your website content, it will help you build domain authority. For example, Wikipedia is one of the first things you see in your search engine results because of its high domain authority and because its content is well-researched and reviewed by editors. Most importantly, you don’t get distracted by unnecessary ads while browsing the content.
Have you visited a website with a copyright of 2014 and the latest blogs are a decade older too? If you have, you may wonder whether they are still operating in your area or not. If you have old content it gives an impression that your business doesn’t keep up with the latest trends and you’re outdated.
2) Check Website’s Coding and Compatibility
You must constantly update your website to know if your site is compatible with the newest browsers. You have to ensure the validity of the source code when your website was first developed.
As the international website standards change, you will eventually identify new ways to update your website. Your website must abide by those standards.
If your website design is compatible and usable, you will find it easy to handle these issues. If you realize that your website is slowing down, you need to identify the elements that have become outdated in your design or backend settings.
3) Improve Loading Speed
Speaking of loading speeds, it is also one of the big reasons why you need to update your website. One of the big problems in our lives these days is that we don’t have enough time to do everything. As a result, no one would like to remain on a website that takes too long to load. A slow loading speed of a website is one of the big reasons behind a high bounce rate.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
Several factors affect the website loading speed. One of them is how the website is coded. If you look at the latest trends in website development, you will realize that most of them are aimed at improving the website’s loading speed. Website updates with relevant and innovative technologies help to reduce the website’s bounce rate and improve Google ranking. Other reasons for a slow website include the following:
- Old website themes
- Cluttered user interfaces (UIs)
- Abundance of unnecessary or unoptimized links
- Heavy image or video files
4) Improves SEO Ranking
You need to update your website content regularly because Google bots are usually triggered to crawl through your web pages. This is beneficial in boosting your SEO rankings and making your content more visible to the audience.
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You need to update your website’s SEO settings because significant changes to Google’s search engine algorithms happen every year. Therefore, you can start by tracking those changes. Sometimes, there are a few iterations every second week and other times, there is a massive update from Google.
Changes in search engine algorithms can impact your website’s SEO ranking in search engine results. You need to update your website if you want to stay ahead of your competitors. If you are using old techniques, it is tough to stay on top of your SEO game.
What is the status of your actual content? How many times do you update your website content? Your answers to these questions may depend on the business type you prioritize. However, most search engines prefer to rank updated websites higher.
5) Ensuring a Mobile-Friendly and Responsive Design
Many businesses put too much focus on website content and internet marketing that they fail to address the navigation system and the design of their website. Some things that you should avoid in your website design include the following:
- Difficult navigation
- Boring or obnoxious colors
- Unnecessary long customer contact forms
All of the above-mentioned factors can be pivotal in steering customers away from your website even if your content is top-notch.
According to the current technological stats, 60% of website traffic comes from mobile phones, such as iPhones, iPads, Android mobiles, and tablets. If your website design is not mobile-friendly or is not compatible with all screen sizes, you can miss out on more than half of your customers online. So, if your website design is only optimized for desktop versions, you must update your website and make it compatible with mobile devices as well.
6) Ensure Data Safety
When it comes to website management, it is all about data security these days. Although the digital world has many advantages these days, there are also a few malicious online users that try to waste all of the hard work done by individuals. Users’ critical data and information are digitized or stored on website servers. For example, your medical history will be stored in the database of healthcare service providers. Maintaining data security is one of the big reasons to update your website because outdated tactics will invite the risk of modern hacking attacks.
If you don’t keep up with the latest data protection trends, all of your website's user data can be compromised or stolen. A content management system (CMS) is vital for website management. If your website has a custom-built security plan, you must check if it matches the common standards.
Update Your Website on Strikingly
If you own a business startup, your utmost objective will always be to promote your products and services. You would imagine a fully-functional website for this matter. Although you are thinking about your website design and content, you must maintain its standards once it is up and running. You must know how to update your website even if you are an established organization. Strikingly is a website builder that makes website maintenance easy.
Image taken from Strikingly
As website maintenance takes more time than building a website, you would need all sets of tools to minimize all the problems in updating your website. The most significant benefit of relying on Strikingly as a website editor is that it eliminates the need to learn programming or coding for the development of your website. Strikingly is a website builder associated with individuals that are new to website design or haven’t had the time to learn the technical skills. It is all about keeping everything straightforward and controlled.
Image taken from Strikingly
The best thing about Strikingly is that you can update your website after it is published and made accessible to the public. The website update can be done the same way as you were editing before publishing. All the updates will be done in real-time so your audience remains updated.
If you are new to Strikingly, you don’t have devote more time understanding how to use the Strikingly website editor. It is ridiculously easy to use. Strikingly’s interface is so simple and unique that all you need to do is drag and drop different elements, such as texts and images, into your chosen template.
Conclusion
Website updates are essential because they keep you updated with the latest marketing trends. It helps you maintain your audience's interest and keep your content attractive. If updating a website is not part of your plans or your site remains the same for too long, it will risk becoming irrelevant or extinct. Just like a restaurant stops flourishing due to the same meal for too long, a website stops producing good results by displaying the same content for a long time.
Strikingly provides you with a smooth experience in building and maintaining a website. Although there could be more reasons to update your website, we are hopeful that the reasons mentioned above are good enough to get you started. Note that your website will always work as an advertisement for your company. By relying on us, you can deal with the front end and let us support the back end to ensure that your site is free from all technical errors.
